Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Thanksgiving Day Open Thread! Vox - Meleagris Gallopavo

"In the year 1621, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving feast. They invited the great Indian chief Massasoit, who brought ninety of his brave Indians and a great abundance of food. Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish were honored guests. Elder William Brewster, who was a minister, said a prayer that went something like this: 'We thank God for our homes and our food and our safety in a new land. We thank God for the opportunity to create a new world for freedom and justice.'"

-- Linus van Pelt

So, with Thanksgiving upon us, we're taking a break until Monday. Enjoy your football! Enjoy your dinners! Enjoy the holiday spirit! Enjoy your family and friends in the non-eWorld!

thankful to be alive, favorable test results, and the ability to enjoy a meal with my wife, cousin, and brother-in-law tomorrow. Although it may sound corny, I am thankful for all of you cyber-friends. Cyber though you may be, I do know you actually exist as real people, and I continue to enjoy shooting the breeze online with you :)

Hey everyone! I've been missing in action, but I am back. I am thankful for my family and friends. Good food, good wine, good football! And yes, our wonderful crowd at Commentarama. You are all the best!

A prayer for the family of LawHawk that they are able to find the joy in the holiday season. Holidays can be the hardest when you lose someone.

I... liked it but looking back now, all I can see are the faults, and they lie in the screenplay. After you see it, we can discuss it. The shame of it is everything else worked: the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music, the effects (they still use models!), etc. But none of that can make up for some serious narrative flaws.

And I finally finished listening to all the DVD commentaries (for research) and am now ready to write my next two reviews: sort of a 4-for-2 deal. :-)

Andrew, don't get me wrong: I enjoyed Skyfall very much. As Scott says, cinematically, it's very tight. I haven't ruminated on it long enough to comment on the narrative as Scott has, though I was very pleased with the thematic resolution. To wit, a common criticism in many of the reviews I've seen is that, only three films in with Craig as Bond, the characters are already pondering whether they are too old and the job is antiquated. This might be troublesome if it weren't for the fact that the film's resolute conclusion is an emphatic, "NO!"

Scott, I'm not surprised sadly. It's amazing how poor Hollywood is at fixing screenplays, even when the fixes are obvious. It's almost like they take the first script they can get that sounds good and they start shooting without ever reading it.

tryanmax, Ah. I hate that. Hollywood does that all the time and it's truly annoying. They did that with Brosnan too and I thought it ruined otherwise good films. The Star Trek films also were damaged that way. Film characters should not run around wondering if they aren't too old and too tired to keep doing what they are written to do. You just can't make exciting films that way.

I agree that it doesn't belong in this Bond film (considering they went to all that trouble of "re-booting" the franchise just six years ago!)...

...but I have no problem with heroes wondering if they're too old. After all, it's just one more conflict to overcome and most movies prove that you're never too old. And in the case of Star Trek, after 25 years it just seemed like a natural progression.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Be thankful for your family and friends and all the good things in your life, for having those things under a Democratic government is certainly better than being under a Republican government and having none of them.

Scott, They dragged the same issue out over six films. It gets really, really tiring to keep hearing them whining that they are too old in film after film. F'n retire if you feel that way. It's not like they didn't choose their jobs. They could all have desk jobs if they just say the word.

On Bond, I don't think it belongs in the series at all. This is meant to be a thrilling/tense action film. The character moments should come out of that, not be tacked on like "he had a bad childhood" or "he feels too old" or "his dog died and he feels depressed." That's BS filler meant to prop up a weak script.

T-Rav, Happy Thanksgiving to you too. And you are right, our government may suck, but our lives don't depend on our government and we should be thankful for the things that make our lives so great! :)

On Bond, yeah, I don't expect a tight narrative, but I do wish that Hollywood would start fixing things that are obviously wrong with the scripts they produce. Seriously, mail each script to me. I'll turn it around in 24 hours and I'll fix all the big stupid stuff the studios seem incapable of spotting.

Right now I'm thankful for lumpias (Filipino egg rolls)! My fiancee's mother brought a lot for Thanksgiving dinner! She makes the best egg rolls in the world! Man, I ate like a pig. Good thing I starved myself for a week before Thanksgiving!

Most of all, I know it sounds corny -- I'm just thankful, I have loved ones to celebrate Thanksgiving with. It's the only thing that matters. Well... The food too!

I'm thankful for a daughter who inherited her mother's cooking skills, a son who made through OIF with only a few issues, a son who has a very promising US Army career and a daughter who has a focus I can only dream about.

I've always loved Thanksgiving as my "favorite" holiday. Used to be Christmas, yet as I got older, I came to get sick of the hype and commercialization. The only gripe I have with T'Giving is the post holiday sales. But even then, I like them as they help boost our economy and keep many small businesses in business the rest of the year. Try managing a business where you lose money all year and depend on one day to boost profitability for the year!

I saw Skyfall also......While Bond has always had the "leave credulity behind" moments when it comes to violence, the Craig films have taken it to a new level. What...no f'ng shrapnel when a frikkin house blows up? And Bourne's handler as a Scottish game warden?

I happened to note a link on Drudge this weekend to an oped in the Washington Examiner. The thrust is "If top 5% of earners pay 40% of taxes, what is their fair share?" That is actually a question worth exploring since it seems to me to me the notion that whatever it is is not enough hurt Romney and the Republicans in this election.

Naturally when I goggled the question "what percentage of total income is made by the top 5% of wage earner?" Not surprisingly, the top hit took me to a media matters analysis which exorciated Fox News for distorting the issue. Fine, but they did the exact same thing tying "percentage growth in income to Percentage of taxes paid" which adds it's own level of distortion.

It strikes me there is only one statistic to consider when trying to answer the question raised in the Examiner piece. That is: "If the top 5% of wage earners paid nearly 40% of income taxes, hat percentage of total income did they earn? It is a little hard to get at and make certain it is apples to apples, but from what I can tell, it is less than 40%. Thus, the answer is unequivocally, YES, they are paying their fair share of income tax. There are, of course, other factors including F.I.C.A., the new Obamacare taxes, and a bevy of other hidden taxes that impact an individual's total federal tax burden relative to pre-tax gross income.

Jed, The problem is that this issue isn't about being rational, it's about salesman ship. If you ask people what a fair rate of tax is, they respond somewhere between 15% and 20%. Yet, we really are paying closer to 35% right now on average, it's just hidden the way they count it. That way people think that they are overpaying, but no one else is. It promotes anger.

The same thing is true with all the other numbers -- percent who don't pay taxes, what the rich pay, what companies pay, etc. It's all intentionally distorted and confused so that everyone thinks that they pay too much but no one else is.

We really need some sort of fairness in tax reporting law that stops breaking this stuff out into fees and charges and which pretends that FICA and SS is not a tax, etc.